BioWare has been paying attention to the fans, so Dragon Age Inquisitions will definitely be seeing the return of a more robust combat system. The studio's not offering exact details at this point, though, just reassurances.

Citing criticism from the first two games, executive producer Mark Darrah states that now the devs are looking into refining Inquisitions based on lessons learned in Origins and Dragon Age II.

Creative director Mike Laidlaw offers his two cents in an exclusive with Game Informer. A big issue (one of several) in Dragon Age II was that it removed a lot of control from the player's hands. Players didn't seem to like that much, particularly the watered-down party system. Sure, you could control and tweak your party a little bit, but it all paled in comparison to the customization and micromanagement from Origins.

Popularity of games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and excitement for games like Wasteland 2, according to Laidlaw, is evidence that players want this control back. And that's what BioWare is trying to do in Inquisitions, while keeping the responsiveness of Dragon Age II's combat.

In an exclusive video, senior gameplay designer Josh Stiksma shows off some of the pre-alpha content. It still looks a lot like Dragon Age II, but he demonstrates how enemies are designed for more strategic confrontations. In one instance, he uses harpoon to stagger an enemy, forcing it to drop its shield. Then he can approach the hostile and attack.

If they can avoid turning it into a button masher like DA2 (geesh that game was basically dynasty warriors) I'll be happy.

A big issue I had with DAO was the large number of passive abilities, especially on tanks. Maybe it gave you options, but constantly cutting down my pool of resources eliminating the capibility to use active abilities was not satisfying.

DA2 was a bit better in this regard with having more active abilities with less passives, but they took it too far by practically eliminating any tactical element in combat and made it mashing A against waves of magically appearing enemies.

I like this. And in addition to the story supposedly being to amass a small army of Inquisitors to combat both sides of the Mage/Templar war and the Demons, means it might be loosely RTS-like. Its all sounding good so far.

“Yeah, and I’d say much more so, because we have the ability tobuild the endings out in a way that we don’t have to worry abouteventually tying them back together somewhere. This story arc iscoming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lotmore different. At this point we’re taking into account so manydecisions that you’ve made as a player and reflecting a lot of thatstuff. It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings,where you can say how many endings there are or whether you gotending A, B, or C.....The endings have a lot more sophistication andvariety in them.”

“Yeah, and I’d say much more so, because we have the ability tobuild the endings out in a way that we don’t have to worry abouteventually tying them back together somewhere. This story arc iscoming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lotmore different. At this point we’re taking into account so manydecisions that you’ve made as a player and reflecting a lot of thatstuff. It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings,where you can say how many endings there are or whether you gotending A, B, or C.....The endings have a lot more sophistication andvariety in them.”

“Yeah, and I’d say much more so, because we have the ability tobuild the endings out in a way that we don’t have to worry abouteventually tying them back together somewhere. This story arc iscoming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lotmore different. At this point we’re taking into account so manydecisions that you’ve made as a player and reflecting a lot of thatstuff. It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings,where you can say how many endings there are or whether you gotending A, B, or C.....The endings have a lot more sophistication andvariety in them.”

Bioware is as trustworthy as a sleezy politician who used to be a door to door salesman selling cancer-b-gone chocolate.

Bioware have only done one bad game by my count which is Dragon Age 2 (Mass Effect 3 was a great game just the ending not so much.)

So i hardly think that makes them as bad as your making them out to be

I beg to differ, I thought Mass Effect 3 as a whole (minus the glorious MP which wasn't even developed by them) was terrible. From the extremely lazy missions, to the extremely lazy auto-dialogue to the extremely lazy plot pacing to the...well, I don't wanna say lazy since I don't know what went on during development of that but jesus was it a mess. The product as a whole was subpar (minus MP).

Then you have the complaints from TOR and Dragon Age 2 and yeah, how the mighty have fallen.